Laila El-Haddad on How Gaza Is Losing Its Food Culture
Her book, The Gaza Kitchen, is a work of “ghost archaeology” — an effort to document the cuisine when Palestinians had more control over their land.
The Gaza Kitchen, written in 2012 by Laila El-Haddad and Maggie Schmitt, is one of the few contemporary English-language texts of Gazan cooking. Schmitt has called the cookbook “ghost archaeology” — an effort to document the cuisine when Palestinians had more control over their land, before the Israeli occupation, disengagement, and subsequent blockade devastated the economy. During the current siege, the Israeli military has bombed fishing boats and displaced Palestinians from their farms, escalating a form of violence that predates the Hamas attack on October 7.
Native Gazan cooking is distinct within Palestine: The cuisine is heavy with spicy red and green chile peppers; dill and dill seed; the use of red tahina, concentrated and rust-colored, made in small batches by toasting sesame seeds over an open flame; and seafood dishes built on sea bream, sardines, shrimp, and crabs. Even the zibdiya, the coarse clay bowls used as mortars for pestling and baking, come from the earth. If food culture begins as an expression of the relationship between people and their environment, then political exigencies are inseparable from Palestinian food. It is as simple as asking: Is there olive oil tonight?
Before writing the cookbook, El-Haddad worked as a journalist in the region for Al Jazeera in the 2000s, as well as publishing the book Gaza Mom, a collection of blog posts and articles from that period. The blog, originally titled Raising Yousuf (after her firstborn), became a place where she would document the everyday challenges of being a mother in Gaza — like being separated from her then 2-month-old to be interrogated at the border crossing. After years of working as a reporter, she reached a point of frustration, like she was writing the same headlines over and over: “Killing of a Palestinian Girl Shatters Family,” “Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinian Woman,” “Gaza Fishermen’s Livelihood on the Line,” “Israeli Sonic Booms Terrorizing Gaza.” “It seemed frivolous and privileged to be able to write a cookbook at a time when Gaza was being blockaded and pounded,” says El-Haddad, who now lives in Maryland with her husband and four children. But the book, and a subsequent appearance on a 2013 episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, allowed her to tell a story that countered the “dehumanization” of Palestinians in Gaza — and to show people the joy that springs from such commonplace acts. “The ability to celebrate and laugh and cook is an act of resistance,” El-Haddad says.
How are you managing?
It’s very overwhelming. It can feel suffocating at times. To give you an example, I just got asked by someone organizing a meeting with Senator Ben Cardin, who’s on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Maryland, “Can you please let me know how many of your family members have been killed so we can convey that information?” And I was double-checking with my family. I was literally told to scroll through the list of Palestinians. So there is the basic task of checking in on family every day, and then on the local level of having to organize. But the most difficult part is trying to justify our humanity, counter the demonization, explain patiently and consistently why we’re human beings deserving of freedom, who should not be killed. It seems like a basic premise, but we’re hearing our own president deny our death.
In 2010, you published your first book, Gaza Mom, a collection of blog posts as well as articles you had written as a journalist for Al Jazeera. How did the blog originally come about?
I started working in Gaza as a journalist around 2003, in the middle of the Second Intifada. I was newly married and had been living in Boston. My husband couldn’t join me — he was forbidden by Israel from coming to visit us in Gaza, since he was a Palestinian refugee — so I began to make that journey back and forth by myself pregnant with my first child. I remember being stuck in Cairo for about 90 days with my 9-month-old because Israel had closed the Rafah crossing indefinitely without explanation. It was very difficult. I was in a city I didn’t know and I needed to get back. I was talking to an Egyptian friend of mine who was like, “Oh, well, you guys must be used to this by now.” I’m like, “No, we’re not. We don’t get used to this and we shouldn’t have to.” She didn’t mean it in a harmful way, but that was a breakthrough moment: How can I convey our experience as a people in a way that would resonate? Gaza Mom is about the ordinary, everyday struggles, the small accumulations that don’t get understood. Gaza has always been considered to be one of two things: victim or aggressor. It sounds a little ludicrous, but people can’t imagine Palestinians sitting around and having a birthday celebration or going to a café or swimming or any of the things that people might do. I write about trying to find diapers for my son when Israel was shutting off the commercial crossings, or being separated from my son when I was still breastfeeding.
You were born in Kuwait and grew up in the Gulf. What was your relationship with Gaza like in your childhood?
My parents were born and raised in Gaza and got married there. They were both physicians who worked in different parts of the Gulf — Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain — but always commuted back to Gaza. As a child, we’d visit on a yearly basis. The majority of our time off was spent there, both to see family but also to renew our Israeli identity documents called hawiya, without which we would have been prevented from returning home forever. Israel began issuing them to Palestinians in 1967 after formally occupying Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and so on. It’s this document they use to control the movement of Palestinians, to restrict where they can go and when. It is specific to the geographic location your parents are from and can only be used to enter or leave that area. If you didn’t renew it, you would become de facto refugees and not be allowed to return back. Every Palestinian has this moment when they understand what it is to be Palestinian. We were stateless.
What was crossing the border into Gaza like?
Traumatizing. Humiliating. The passages across the border to get back home, particularly during the First Intifada, are seared in my memory: the long lines, the endless waiting, the strip searches. You’d be told to strip completely naked and then your clothes would be thrown into a pile. Then you would be told to go and retrieve your clothes and shoes from the big pile all at once.
And that was just to be able to go back. From there, you’d have to endure multiple Israeli occupation checkpoints and curfews. I think it was Rashid Khalidi who said your Palestinian-ness becomes apparent on borders. That’s where you’re made aware of what it means to be Palestinian, of being singled out, of being humiliated, of being forced to always wait for the promise of something that doesn’t materialize.
Considering the difficulty, why was it important for you to go to Gaza to live and work there?
The long and short of it is, I didn’t really have a choice because I was on a scholarship that was conditional upon my returning to Gaza when I finished. Growing up, we felt somewhat resentful of my mother for making us go through those traumatic experiences across the border. We didn’t understand until we got older why she did it. But then, we became resentful almost for a different reason. Why didn’t you take us more? Why weren’t we living there? I always vowed that when I had a chance, I would go back. I wanted to immerse myself fully in my home that I had been removed from.
It’s funny, because just before this all happened, my husband and I were getting to the point where we wanted to take our kids back for a year or two. Part of it was due to this feeling of apathy and disconnectedness that ensues when you are living in an American suburb. We feel it’s important, not just as Palestinians, but as people concerned with justice and humanity, to immerse ourselves amongst communities that are vulnerable.
Reading your books, you mention that your grandfather had a farm in Gaza. What are your memories of that?
My grandfather had a family farm, or bayarra in Palestinian vernacular, in an area of central Gaza known as Abo Holi, close to the former Israeli settlement bloc of Gush Katif. There was a small rest house, and rows of orange and olive trees, a few pomegranate, and the sweetest guavas I’ve ever tasted. I remember in particular an oversized sycamore fig — jumaiz in Arabic — with a grapevine twisting around it, and large looping branches that my young brother and I would swing on while eating the grapes. The entire farm, along with dozens of other privately owned farms in the area, was razed to the ground by armored Israeli bulldozers without notice in the fall of 2000 during the second Palestinian intifada. It was completely flattened. I had just started my master’s at the Harvard Kennedy School when I heard the news. I believe it was punitive.
How did you make your way toward writing The Gaza Kitchen with Maggie Schmitt? Was food a way for you to access home?
Growing up, I felt somewhat disconnected from what it meant to be Palestinian. I may not have fully grasped what the Palestinian struggle was about, but I could taste it. This was especially the case being from Gaza. Early on I recognized there was something different about our food. There was this informal network of other Palestinians from Gaza in Saudi through which we would obtain ingredients that were hard to find. Because travel to and from Gaza was so difficult, whenever we found out somebody was going, we all would have requests: a jar of sour arasiya jam from an aunt, a bag of Gazan-grown dill seeds, a bag of hand-rolled and sun-dried Gazan maftool, a tray of kunafa arabiya from Saqallah’s Sweets, and so on.
You described red tahina as symbolic of Gazan cuisine, but also that it was becoming an “endangered species” because Gazans weren’t able to get something as basic as sesame seeds to make it.
When we wrote the book, in 2012, we made a prediction that in several years Gaza was going to get to the point where Palestinians in Gaza would no longer have access or be able to afford the ingredients that were native to the area, staples in the pantry, including things like olive oil, paprika, and tahina. All tahina, not just red tahina. When I went back in 2019 with the World Food Program, that is exactly what I observed. It was horrifying and sad. Not a single one had olive oil in their house. They were making a lot of lentil-based dishes, the one bowl meal. Those usually rely on olive oil — or even going further back, with sesame oil. Sesame oil and olive oil were the two main staple fats in Palestine. You need that rich, hearty fat because there’s no meat.
In another household, they hadn’t had fish for six months. The only fish they were able to eat was frozen fish that was brought from Thailand somehow. We’re talking about a strip of land that is on the coast of the Mediterranean with rich fishing waters — the only part of current, modern-day occupied Palestine with access to the coast. And they can’t afford even that fish. The naval blockade is very extreme; it’s at most like three or four nautical miles. When things ease up, it can go up to eight or so. There are no bowies demarcating where these nebulous lines start and end — only Israeli gunships who might shoot at, detain, and torture fisherman at sea. The deep sea channel is around nine nautical miles, where fishermen would be able to get those bigger fish. Even when they do, they are usually going to be sold to a few restaurants and hotels that host foreign delegations and humanitarian aid workers. The local population can’t even afford the smaller fish that might be caught, like sardines.
You were living and working in Gaza in 2005 when Israel first disengaged from the territory. How did Israel’s disengagement and subsequent sanctions and blockade after the election affect the agricultural industries in Gaza? Were those the primary economic exports?
Yes, along with textiles. In short, the impact was catastrophic, and resulted in a new reality that the UN described as “fishing without water, farming without land.” Immediately after the Disengagement, and before the elections even took place in 2006, Israel imposed an indefinite and total closure of Gaza’s commercial and land crossings. It plunged the Palestinian economy of Gaza into an unprecedented crisis, and happened to coincide with strawberry and cherry-tomato season — two of Gaza’s main exports at the time. Farmers were having to dump their produce on the local market or feed them to animals as they could no longer export them — without Israeli approval of course — to the West Bank, Israel, and Europe. This marked the beginning of what would become the new normal of Israel’s chokehold policy over Gaza, which ultimately evolved into sanctions after the elections, and eventually, all-out blockade. As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Control oil, and you control nations; control food, and you control people.”
Recently, a clip from Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown has gone viral. It begins with you showing him around Gaza, staring at the seaside where you see kids playing on the beach and fishermen bringing in the catch. How was that experience for you?
It was amazing. The producers initially seemed to suggest they just wanted to use me for background information. I said, “No, I want to go. I want to be there.” But this producer kept sidelining me: “We can’t do anything. We can’t help.” So I went by myself. I went through Egypt and I met Tony in Gaza City. By the end, they were so head over heels with the whole experience that one of the producers was literally saying, “What expenses do you want to cover? What can we do?” After they had treated me like shit. I had a child I was nursing, my daughter, and they wouldn’t let me go in their car because they were like, “Oh, no, we’re not liable.”
When we made it happen, it was surreal. The first thing he said to me when I met him in Gaza City was, “Hi, I’m Tony. And I just cannot believe what I just saw. I just came out from an Israeli settlement, and I remember telling the settlers, ‘You’re not going to like the cake you’re baking. This is going to implode very soon, and it’s not going to be pretty.’” He was truly disgusted with what he had just seen coming out of the West Bank.
What did you think of the episode after you watched it?
I really appreciated that they made that decision to go to Gaza and not cover tunnels and rockets and ask people’s opinions about Hamas, which is pretty much all anyone ever wants to do. They actually listened to what matters to people there and took that seriously. They listened to them talk about the villages they were displaced from without questioning it. No one had covered Gaza in the mainstream media the way that Tony had before that. Just being able to have conversations in which Palestinians are seen laughing and yelling and seem ordinary was the most powerful part of the piece. My only gripe, which I conveyed to Tony, was that the way that it ended on this note of, like, “If only we can all get along …” My understanding from him and from the producers was that, had they not framed it that way, they weren’t going to let it air.
What did he say to that?
Let me see if I can find the original email from him. He said, “I couldn’t agree more. We fought like hell though, to tell the stories we did the best we could tell them. And I’m on balance pretty happy with the result, though I have definite reservations. In any event, all the right people are infuriated.”
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